Tonight AP, Students read at Ventura Library; Call for Local Poets re Fire and Mud

Finally a fall feeling…The leaves have fallen and now the rain is falling also.

This semester my students and I began with Seth Godin’s Stop Stealing Dreams, and quickly moved into reflections on the writing process. Next we got our feet wet with plastic pollution in the ocean via our text Gyre, and we discussed in the context of fire and mud as well as Nature Deficit Disorder. We visited Art City and the Avant Garden and saw art in action. In October, we set our stories side by side with those of classmates and textbooks, and then with our book club books as well as the story behind Theodosia Burr Shepherd with a surprise guest appearance from her daughter. As the semester came to a close, we finished and closed our books after completing our research papers.

And we’ve produced a class publication which we will be reading from tonight Th. Dec. 6 at the EP Foster Library in downtown Ventura on Main street between Fir and Chestnut across from Winchesters. Above is one of my contributions.

We’ll be sharing our work in the open mic that follows the 7:30pm reading by featured poet Paul Willis,  a professor from Westmont College.

A very special reading that won’t have an open mic will be held next month on January 14 at the Museum of Ventura County.

Local poets laureate invite you to submit work about the recent tragic events in our community: Phil Taggart (Ventura County Poet Laureate), Enid Osborn (Santa Barbara Poet Laureate) and Ricardo Means Ybarra (Malibu Poet Laureate) state that “In less than a year our community has had two incredibly destructive fires and a tragic flood/mudslide.  Our communities came together in recovery to house, heal and rebuild. We’re looking for poems about the fires and floods to be read at this event.”